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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22766791">hand to strange hand</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtbaguet/pseuds/dirtbaguet'>dirtbaguet</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>hand-holding as a form of healing [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Childhood Friends, F/M, Missing Scene, post reclaiming the baguette of ruin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 12:35:14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,454</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22766791</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtbaguet/pseuds/dirtbaguet</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>More than his father’s disappointment, more than Miklan’s violence, Sylvain is afraid of finding his childhood friends at a loss in the face of him fraying at the edges.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Felix Hugo Fraldarius &amp; Sylvain Jose Gautier, Sylvain Jose Gautier/Mercedes von Martritz</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>hand-holding as a form of healing [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1649200</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>140</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>hand to strange hand</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">Sylvain grows up wiping away tears, but they’re rarely his own.</p><p class="p1">Most of them are Felix’s because Felix grows up caring too fiercely for His Young Highness, and Dimitri, in turn, drops his princely pretenses enough around Felix to be stubborn. Sylvain remembers sitting huddled in the small garden behind the kitchen at the Kingdom palace, dabbing at Felix’s small round face with one of his mother’s rose-perfumed handkerchiefs. He ponders the purpose of hiding when Felix wails louder than slaughtered cattle, unabashed with the strength of his feelings and the depth of his hurt. It’s only when Rodrigue finds them and carries Felix away in his arms, leaving behind an apologetic smile and word of thanks for Sylvain, that he gets it.</p><p class="p1">Felix does being a kid right. It isn't a conscious scheme so much as an act of intuition: he sends out bright, blaring distress signals into the midday sky because he can count on a knight in shining armor sweeping by to save him. He has two in his family and they both hold his hand.</p><p class="p1">After Duscur, Felix loses Glenn’s hand (along with the rest of his slaughtered form) and spits on Rodrigue’s in disgust. Felix stops crying and learns to grow thorns. But still, he is ruthlessly honest in a way that is not ingrained into Sylvain’s character.</p><p class="p1">Sylvain was never rewarded for honesty as a child, and now it might be too late to be conditioned for it. He’s spent too long whispering soft assurances at Felix’s explosive waterworks, too long talking down Ingrid's righteous huffiness, too long making silly faces to soothe His Highness’s quiet temper. This is where he's needed among the four of them—a heavy cloak around the shoulders of children abandoned in the frigid Faerghus winter, cheeks whipped by her tailwind.</p><p class="p1">More than his father’s disappointment, more than Miklan’s violence, Sylvain is afraid of finding his childhood friends at a loss in the face of him fraying at the edges. In response, he can only imagine stitching himself back together and tucking the ugly patchwork out of sight.</p><p class="p1">See? It's all right, he’d say.</p><p class="p1">Sylvain is doing just fine.</p><p class="p2">_____________________</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p1">When Sylvain sees water drops wet Miklan’s scarred face, he looks to the sky. The rainfall had ceased hours ago, leaving the heavens clear and dispassionate.</p><p class="p1"><em>Ah, I’m a human cliché</em>. He chokes quietly on the thought over his brother’s corpse.</p><p class="p1">After the troops had set up camp for the night on the way back to Garreg Mach, Sylvain snuck away under the cover of shadows back to the Tower of Black Winds. Miklan lies at the top floor, torn and rotting—because how else would Sylvain find him? It’s not as if anyone has ever cared enough about him to leave him any other way.</p><p class="p1">When he was alive, Miklan was less a brother than a heavy weight in Sylvain’s heart. Now that Miklan is dead, <em>heavy</em> doesn’t begin to describe the weight that’s on Sylvain's back. He is heaving for breath by the time he makes it down the seemingly never-ending spiral of stairs. He considers slamming Miklan down in the muddy grass in resentment and regret that he’s out in the cold of night trying to lay his good-for-nothing brother to rest rather than pressed warm against the soft form of a pliant woman.</p><p class="p1">But instead, he lets Miklan down easy. He always does.</p><p class="p1">He doesn’t have a shovel but finds a jagged sheet of scrap metal that is hardly better than digging with his nails. The dirt is loose from the day’s downpour, which should be good, but the dirt is also wet and heavy, which makes his makeshift shovel slip out of his hand and into his forearms. He’s barely down to his wrists in the ground by the time he hears muscles he didn’t know he had moaning in protest as he lifts another layer of dirt. Idly, his mind sets the scene for a hypothetical ambush by rogue bandits. He's lived most of his life wasting his energy cleaning up his brother’s messes, and any moment now he might get to end it doing the same.</p><p class="p1">As if in eager response to this thought, the leaves rustle before him. Sylvain scrambles for his lance. His fingers tremble. He can barely feel his own grip around the rod.</p><p class="p1">He holds his breath, listening for clues. How many of them are there? Do they stomp with the heft of artillery? Are they wandering through the area or making a beeline advance for him?</p><p class="p1">“Oh dear,” says a familiar voice. Sylvain’s eyes widen over Mercedes’s pale face, rising from the shadows of shrubbery like a shining sea dollar. “There you are, Sylvain.”</p><p class="p1">“Wh—” Sylvain sputters for a moment, letting the lance roll to the ground. His mind is scrambling clumsily for a clever response that doesn’t explain anything but says enough. He’s too tired and doesn’t know Mercedes well enough at all to have a feel for how much he can get away with. The entirety of his intel on her is this: 1) she’s immune to his flirtations, and 2) hers is another life the existence of Crests has left in ruins.</p><p class="p1">Mercedes, on the other hand, seems to be at the center of her bearings. As she nears him determinedly, her calm blue eyes scan him up and down, pausing briefly at his bloodied hands and gashed arms, before settling over his face. Her lips curl softly, like she is facing a skittish animal.</p><p class="p1">With the eye of a practice jeweler, he appraises her smile and finds it well-practiced but not disingenuous.</p><p class="p1">When he punches laughter from his chest, it is both: “Hey there, Mercedes! Who knew that digging a giant hole in the ground would be such a chore!”</p><p class="p1">“You’ve been working hard,” she says with gentle compassion, squatting down in front of him, across from his shallow little ditch in the dirt.</p><p class="p1">“Hey, a guy’s gotta work hard at <em>something</em>, right?” Sylvain continues laughing, a knot tight in his throat and another throttling his heart.</p><p class="p1">Mercedes tilts her head in consideration, gaze steady and penetrative in a way that makes Sylvain shutter his eyes in defense. He looks to her hands instead as they lift slowly from her knees, the pale glow of white magic sparking from her fingertips. He waits for her to hover over the series of angry-red blisters and lacerations that even he has to admit leave him looking quite haggard and pathetic.</p><p class="p1">He jolts in surprised when she moves without recess past the wounds she’s been inspecting and lays both hands over his chest, slightly off-center. As he feels the cavity behind his breastbone warming, a sound like crushed air breaks past his lips. The beat of his heart slows while wisps of her magic lay salve carefully over the litany of poorly-cauterized scars that map its surface.</p><p class="p1">“Is this—a healer thing?”</p><p class="p1">Mercedes hums quietly, and for a few long moments he thinks that that is her answer. But then: “I don’t think it takes a healer to see where you’re hurting most.”</p><p class="p1">Sylvain swallows. The noose is gone from his throat, but now so are his words.</p><p class="p1">More than his father’s disappointment, more than Miklan’s violence, this is what Sylvain’s nightmares are made of: that one day, someone will come along and tug curiously at one of the many fraying ends he keeps folding frantically behind cheesy pick-up lines and charming smiles. And just like that, the sturdy, dependable cloak he’s woven out of himself for the people who are more than family to him—whose hurt is so much greater than his own—is going to unravel endlessly and leave behind the truth. That he is a piece of string stretched thin.</p><p class="p1">He fears that they’re all going to know. He fears that no one will ever care to know.</p><p class="p1">The yellow sparks rescind from Mercedes’s fingers. She doesn’t leave him good as new, but it is easier to breathe than it was before. It is easier to pretend that there is still someone in his entire sorry life who can look into him and see something glowing and good inside his soul.</p><p class="p1">“Now, let’s see about fixing up those terrible cuts, shall we?”</p><p class="p1">Mercedes smiles steady and placid, like a pond with stone unthrown. Sylvain is overcome with the impulse to overturn the bowl of stars in the sky just to see how they’d ripple in the serenity of her eyes. But even the Goddess herself can do no such thing, never mind a mere mortal like him.</p><p class="p1">So instead, he puts himself in her hands.</p><p class="p1">She’s no knight in shining armor, but she holds his hands.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>let it be known that felix/ingrid/dimitri urgently but politely invited mercedes out of her bedroll in the middle of the night to track down sylvain together &amp; the three of them are posed behind a bush or smth watching all this happen bc they know that Big Brother Sylvain would try too hard to pretend to be okay if it was one of them who went out to talk to him yk yk </p><p>anyway pls talk to me about childhood friends squad and/or sylmercie feels!! ♥</p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/dirtbaguet">twitter</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/dirtbaguet/status/1229516765841043456?s=20">RT this fic</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
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